There’s a growing trend in the AI world that honestly made me stop scrolling. The idea of “Colleague Skill,” where you distill a person’s job into an AI agent skill. Colleague leaves? No worries, you’ve already captured what they do in a neat little prompt.
Sounds efficient. Sounds smart. And this LinkedIn creator argues it’s fundamentally flawed thinking.
The original poster makes a sharp point: people are not agents. You can’t just bottle up what someone does and expect an AI copy to match the real thing. But here’s where the post gets interesting, because instead of just criticizing, the author flips the entire concept on its head.
The Real Power Move: Distill Yourself
Instead of turning your colleagues into AI skills, the expert suggests you do this exercise on yourself. Not to replace yourself, but to get crystal clear on two things:
- Which parts of your work AI can actually handle for you right now
- Where you need to double down to stay irreplaceable
That reframe changes everything. It shifts from a creepy “let’s clone our team” vibe to a genuinely useful self-assessment tool.
The Math That Decision-Makers Keep Ignoring
Here’s the part I found most compelling. The author lays out a simple calculation:
You distill a colleague into an AI agent skill. Best case scenario? The skill handles about 50% of the job. That’s just half the work done, with no judgment, no creativity, no human nuance.
But take that same colleague and give them AI agents to work with? The output multiplies way beyond that 50%.
The difference between replacing a person with AI and empowering a person with AI is massive. Decision-makers who only see the first option are leaving serious value on the table.
A Tool to Test This Yourself
The innovator behind the post is actually building something practical around this idea. It’s a tool where you:
- Input your role or job description
- It calculates the percentage of your work that could be distilled into an AI skill
- It analyzes the results so you can see where your real strengths are
The tool is still a work in progress, but the concept alone is worth thinking about. Knowing exactly which 50% of your job is “automatable” tells you exactly which 50% makes you valuable.
Career Resilience Is More Than Buzzwords
What I appreciate about this post is that it doesn’t stop at the hot take. The mind behind it connects this to a bigger conversation about career resilience: not just surviving the next round of layoffs, but building a strategy for the mid-to-long term.
That means understanding AI’s impact on your specific role, not AI in general. Your tasks. Your workflows. Your unique value.
If you’ve been wondering how to actually future-proof your career instead of just reading about it, this is a solid starting point. Go check out the full LinkedIn post for the complete breakdown and details on the upcoming live demo.